Two weeks inside the Egyptian revolution.

On the third day of the protests, they caught a thief in the act at the Omar Makram Mosque. It happened during midday prayers, when most of the men were lined up facing the front. The mosque sits on the southwestern corner of Tahrir Square, in downtown Cairo, and the windows and door were open to the roar of the crowd outside. The sound had the rhythm of the ocean, constant but ever changing, and periodically it swelled to a crescendo, like a big wave hitting a beach. A day earlier, violence had started when police tried to clear demonstrators from the square, and since then it had escalated, with protesters demanding the end of military rule in Egypt. By nightfall, there would be reports of the first fatalities, along with word of more than a thousand wounded. Volunteer doctors had set up emergency clinics in and around the mosque, and every few minutes a siren sounded as an ambulance delivered another injured protester. With all the excitement, the thief must have assumed that nobody would pay attention to a cell phone plugged into a charger inside the mosque. He crept over and pocketed the phone while its owner was praying.

But an old man happened to be watching from the back. He had a long white beard, and he moved almost as quietly as the thief. He waited until the prayers were finished, and then, with a few whispered words, he recruited a group of men, including a college student named Mohammed Gemel. By the time a second round of worshippers had begun to pray aloud—“Allahu akbar! Allahu akbar!”—the men had the thief with his back against the wall.

He gave up the phone without a struggle.

“Why did you steal this?” the old man asked.

“I’m sorry. I had a phone, but somebody took it.”

“Where’s your I.D.?” Mohammed asked.

The thief claimed that he was too young to have a government-issued card. He was very thin, with a sallow, unhealthy complexion, and his clothes were filthy. His left eye was red—maybe somebody had hit him recently, or maybe it was from the tear gas on the square. There were many red-eyed people on Tahrir that day.

“Have you done this before?” Mohammed asked.

“No, this is the first time.”

“This is haraam!” the old man said. “Do you understand that? We could call the police and have you arrested.”

In truth, no cop would be going near the Omar Makram Mosque that day. Justice would come from this group of men, and the thief knew it. He looked terrified; his body had gone limp and his arms jerked up like a puppet’s when Mohammed demanded to search him. He found a lighter in a pocket, as well as a box of Ventolin, the asthma medication that doctors were distributing to tear-gas victims. Mohammed removed a string of prayer beads that hung around the thief’s neck. “I know this isn’t yours,” he said. He handed the items to the old man, who kept the beads but returned the other possessions. The old man leaned close and lectured the thief for a minute in a quiet voice. When the thief realized that he was being allowed to go, he was so relieved that for a moment he stood there frozen, his face flushed. And then he vanished into the chaos of the square.

I had met Mohammed Gemel a couple of hours earlier, on Tahrir, near the foot of the side street that ran to the Ministry of the Interior. The worst fighting was happening in front of that building; protesters were storming it with sticks and rocks, while cops in riot gear fired tear-gas cannisters, rubber bullets, and bird shot. On the square itself, there was still no violence, but the crowd was skittish. Every now and then, a group would get startled for no apparent reason and begin to run, with the panic spreading until hundreds were sprinting, and then the surge would stop as abruptly as it had begun. After one of these rushes, I noticed Mohammed standing quietly off to the side. He had a gentle, heavy-lidded expression—it was rare to see somebody in this crowd who looked so calm.

We struck up a conversation, first in my poor Arabic and then in his better English, and he told me that he was a senior at Ain Shams University, studying pharmacology. He had skipped a midterm exam so he could be at the square that day. He said that usually he was an excellent student, but last spring he had failed some courses because he had spent so much time participating in the revolution, which had forced President Hosni Mubarak to resign, in February. Since then, Egypt had been under the stewardship of the military. The country still lacked a new constitution, and elections had been delayed. The people were scheduled to choose a new parliament in a series of votes beginning in late November, but there had been reports that a Presidential election might not happen until 2013. As the parliamentary vote approached, the military attempted to grant itself some permanent political powers, a move that had sparked the current round of protests.

These demonstrations had first been organized by the country’s Islamist political parties. The Muslim Brotherhood was the largest of these groups, and it was considered the favorite in the upcoming elections. From the Islamists’ perspective, the military’s move seemed calculated to protect against a possible victory by the Brotherhood, which had been banned (but largely tolerated) in Egypt for decades under Mubarak. A one-day protest on Tahrir had been peaceful, but violence erupted the following day, when the police tried to forcibly remove some demonstrators who were staging a sit-in.

After that, the target shifted to the Ministry of the Interior, which is situated a couple of blocks off the square and serves as the headquarters for law enforcement in Egypt. By the third day of these new protests, tens of thousands had flocked to Tahrir, most of them young people who had not participated in the Islamists’ march. There was no larger organization that spoke for these demonstrators, who chanted slogans about freedom and democracy. Mohammed Gemel told me that he had no interest in joining a party. “I’m independent,” he said. “It’s better to be by yourself.” He said that he had come to the square because he feared that the ideals of the Arab Spring were being corrupted by military rule. But he also hoped that the Muslim Brotherhood would perform well in the elections. “They are very hardworking and very disciplined,” he said. “If they win, the country will improve.” When it came time for the midday prayers, he invited me to come along to the Omar Makram Mosque, and I agreed.

The mosque was the only institution on Tahrir that remained open to the revolution. All shops and restaurants had been shut down, along with the Egyptian Museum of Antiquities and the campus of the American University in Cairo. The Mogamma, a large building that faces the square and houses many government bureaus, was nominally open, but there was a tacit agreement that it was off limits to protesters. The Omar Makram Mosque, though, welcomed everybody. It had a tradition of being involved in politics; the mosque is close to many government offices and ministries, and is named for an Egyptian commander who resisted French and British imperialism in the early eighteen-hundreds.

But for many people on Tahrir the mosque’s appeal was pragmatic rather than symbolic. It was a sprawling stone building, big enough to house makeshift medical clinics, pharmacies, and storerooms. It had the only public bathrooms on the square, as well as electrical outlets—there were always dozens of people charging cell phones inside. Hundreds slept there every night. Sometimes you saw people eating. None of this was normal mosque behavior, but for the time being certain rules had been suspended, including the strict ban on women in the men’s prayer room. The women’s entrance had been converted into a small hospital, which meant that women had to walk through the men’s prayer room in order to reach their own section of the mosque. Usually, prayer times are for believers, but Mohammed Gemel assured me that nobody would mind if I sat in the back at a moment like this. When I watched him and the others handle the thief, I sensed that they treated him gently because they had faith in the revolution that was happening outside.

On the fifth day of the protests, the body of a demonstrator was carried into the mosque. At first, there was a roar of voices outside, growing steadily louder, until a group of men appeared in the doorway with an open coffin on their shoulders. They set the body before the mihrab, the niche at the front of the mosque which marks the direction of Mecca. A small group of women dressed in black had followed them inside; one of them was the dead man’s mother. She clutched a tiny photograph of her son and entered the mosque shouting; along with the other women, she tried to push her way toward the mihrab. Some men blocked their way, arguing and yelling that it was forbidden, until finally the women retreated. But they refused to leave—they stood off to the side, wailing throughout the short funeral.

One of the men who had accompanied the coffin told me that the dead protester was twenty-five years old, and that he had a college degree in tourism. He had been killed the previous night. When I asked how he had died, the man reached into his pocket and pulled out two empty bullet casings. It was common for people who had fought near the Ministry of the Interior to collect such things—sometimes you saw a wounded demonstrator who had fashioned a necklace out of spent casings and empty tear-gas cannisters. In the past two days, there had been more instances of police using live ammunition.

The demonstrators were remarkably skilled at the logistics of their fight, despite the lack of political organization. Dozens of medical stations had sprung up all over the square—many doctors and pharmacists had learned how to throw together an emergency clinic during the initial protests of the Arab Spring. Volunteers took the place of police, setting up roadblocks where they checked I.D.s and searched bags. On the morning of the funeral, the crowd on the square was estimated at close to a hundred thousand, and it was the first day that I saw large numbers of women and middle-class Egyptians. Most of these people stayed on Tahrir, which remained safe, while packs of young men with protective face masks attacked the ministry. Lanes were kept clear for ambulances and motorbikes—the demonstrators had developed an efficient system for relaying casualties back from the front. The vehicles would roar past, sirens and horns blaring, and the Tahrir crowd would crane their necks to catch a glimpse of the injured. Venders sold popcorn, lentils, and roasted yams; they boiled tea and coffee on propane stoves. A couple of cotton-candy sellers worked the crowd with fifteen-foot-tall stacks of pink bags.

In Cairo, the square had become a self-contained world: people went there to demonstrate, but the protests never occupied other parts of the city. I live less than a mile from the square, and from my neighborhood it was impossible to guess that anything was happening. And it was just as hard to tell what the response would be from the country’s leaders. Since the fall of Mubarak, Egypt had already had two Prime Ministers, and the Cabinet offered to resign en masse on the fourth day of the protests. Meanwhile, the Muslim Brotherhood appealed for restraint; it was backing away from the movement that it had helped spark. Its leaders asked members not to appear on the square, out of concern that growing unrest might delay the parliamentary elections. But none of these political maneuvers seemed to have any effect on the young men who were fighting. Many were teen-agers—more than half the population of Egypt is twenty-five or younger. On the front lines, the most dedicated fighters tended to look poor, and they were so focussed on the routines of this strange battle that it acquired the quality of ritual: rush to the front, inhale some tear gas, get evacuated on a motorbike; turn around and do it all over again.

At the mosque, the young man in the coffin was one of more than thirty who had died thus far. Standing before the body, a bearded sheikh told the story of Hamzah, an uncle of the Prophet, who had been martyred in one of the early battles with the Meccans. Then the sheikh talked about the protests on Tahrir, his voice rising. “Everyone who is now going out should say ‘No!’ to all the frustration and injustice! Know that we are counting this man as a martyr in God’s Paradise!” he said. “We swear to God that this will not be in vain! This blood is good blood! It was spilled for the world of justice! So hear me, people of God! We will demonstrate, we will stay here until we get revenge for the martyrs!”

A man in the crowd joined in: “God, please let us die for our cause! God, please let us die for our cause!”

“God is great! God is great! God is great!”

And now all the men were yelling, and pulling on face masks, and pushing to get out the door and back to the battle. Some of them hoisted the coffin and carried it away. The dead man’s mother wailed, and another woman at her side shouted about the cruelty of the police. “Haraam! Haraam!” she yelled. “These are lessons in crime!”

“Woman, this is the military system,” a man said. “This is what we get from a military regime.”

The room seemed very quiet after they were gone. Some people in the back had slept through the service, wrapped in heavy wool blankets. A young volunteer pharmacist manned a small clinic beside the mihrab; when I asked about the funeral, he blinked and said that he had been too busy to pay attention. Most of his patients suffered from exposure to tear gas, and he had worked for two days with almost no sleep. The floor was littered with wrappers, vials, and bottles; while we were talking, the pharmacist stepped on a syringe and sliced open his foot. He reached down and slowly applied a bandage, a distant expression on his face, as if he were scratching an itch. He was barefoot. That was one rule that didn’t change; nobody wore shoes in the mosque.

On the sixth day of the protests, the Nike sandals of a man named Salem Abd-Elsalem were stolen while he was praying in the mosque. “El hamdulillah!” he said warmly, when I met him at the back of the prayer room and asked how he was doing. “All praise be to God!” We chatted for a couple of minutes before he mentioned the theft. I couldn’t imagine getting stranded barefoot at the edge of Tahrir, with its acres of marching demonstrators, but Salem seemed perfectly good-humored. A volunteer caretaker at the mosque eventually found him a spare pair of slippers.

About a dozen young revolutionaries had offered to help out at the mosque. I spoke most often with Waleed, a skinny, sharp-eyed man in his early thirties. He wore a white sweater every day; like most of the others, he seemed to have arrived with little more than the clothes on his back. He constantly rushed around the prayer room, taking care of various problems. Waleed and the others distributed blankets to people who were tired, and they handled the food and other supplies that had been donated. The mosque also served as the main seat of justice on Tahrir. Whenever somebody was caught committing a crime, he was taken to the mosque; if the violation was serious, his hands were bound and he was locked in an upstairs room. In addition, the volunteers operated a lost and found. When I asked Waleed if there was much theft on the square, he didn’t say a word. He picked up two big plastic bags full of things that had been confiscated and dumped them out: wallets, family photographs, I.D. cards, all of them strewn across the carpet where people prayed.

On most days, I went alone to the square and wandered around, and then I sat in the back of the mosque. After a while, I started bringing a translator, so that I could learn more. The mosque was a good place to strike up conversations; people always wanted to know where I was from, and when they learned I wasn’t Muslim they made a point of saying that the mosque was open to everybody. A couple of times, somebody clasped my hand and declared in a dramatic tone that if violence flared up he would defend me with his life. But the truth was that I felt safe in the early days of the protests, despite the fact that people were dying. The violence was very localized, and I didn’t sense any anti-foreigner sentiment; people couldn’t have been friendlier to me on Tahrir.

The mood began to change, though, when the fighting stopped. After a week of protests, a temporary ceasefire at the ministry was negotiated by sheikhs from Al-Azhar, the most respected Islamic institution in Egypt. During the truce, the military erected walls of concrete and barbed wire around the approaches to the Ministry of the Interior. The physical separation and the truce made a difference—once the rhythm of the attacks was broken, it was as if a hypnotist had snapped his fingers, and the protesters seemed to lose focus. I began to notice more skirmishes breaking out between people on Tahrir. Without a clear target, the energy of the crowd went elsewhere, and fights became common. Suddenly, half the young men seemed to become volunteer security guards—there were evenings when I was forced to produce my passport half a dozen times in the span of an hour. During this period, the headlines seemed calmer—there were no more fatalities—but the square began to feel more troubled.

At the mosque, it became apparent that nobody was in charge. The imam was Sheikh Mazhar Shahin, a handsome man who often appears on religious television programs. He’s a celebrity in Egypt, and at the beginning of the violence he had made a high-profile attempt to broker peace, which failed. But during this period he never seemed to be at the mosque. I went for ten straight days without seeing him, even between the sunset and evening prayers, when regulations would require him to stay at his post. (Omar Makram, like many mosques in Egypt, is administered by the government.) Wildly contradictory theories floated around about the Sheikh’s whereabouts. Some said that he didn’t want too much contact with the revolution, because he had risen under the old regime; others claimed that he didn’t want to associate with fundamentalist sheikhs who had been spending time at Omar Makram since the protests began.

It was true that a number of Salafis, the most conservative Islamists in Egypt, had come to Tahrir and were using the mosque as their base. When I sat down with one of them, he told me that he supported the revolution because he believed that it represented the first step toward the institution of Sharia nationwide. (He also scraped his finger along my cheek and shook his head, indicating that I needed to stop shaving; the Salafis are known for growing long beards in the manner of the Prophet.) But it didn’t make sense why such opinions would drive somebody like Sheikh Mazhar away from his own mosque. He was known for being progressive—he often spoke out in support of the Arab Spring—but he was also savvy, and undoubtedly he had dealt with plenty of fundamentalists.

It seemed more likely that while Sheikh Mazhar was comfortable promoting the ideals of the revolution, he had less interest in getting involved in the messy details on the ground. Other political figures and parties followed this strategy; the Muslim Brotherhood kept its distance from Tahrir, counting on the election to bring peace. Meanwhile, the military seemed intent on minimizing its response. It accepted the resignation of the Cabinet, and it made a new promise to hold Presidential elections no later than June of 2012. It replaced the Prime Minister—the third person to hold the office in less than a year. The new leadership was referred to as a “national salvation government,” a phrase that hardly inspired confidence. And it was still unclear if the Army planned to give up control. The top official, Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi, said little about the protests, despite the fact that demonstrators were calling for his resignation.

In Omar Makram, people often talked about Sheikh Mazhar’s absence. “I’ve tried to call him, but there’s no answer,” Sheikh Samy, one of the religious men who had taken up temporary residence in the mosque, told me through a translator. He said that he didn’t know why the imam stayed away, but it wasn’t his business. He also remarked that there was a clear difference between the current revolution and the one that had fought against Mubarak’s regime. “In January, it was the upper and middle class,” the Sheikh said. “They were asking for social justice and freedom. But now it’s a revolution for the poor people. These are people who have nothing.” He said that their ideas were confused, but they still deserved sympathy and respect. “They don’t come just to cause trouble,” he said. “They have hard lives and a lot of anger.”

While we were talking, half a dozen young men appeared in the mosque with a complaint. They told Sheikh Samy that a Coptic Christian woman on the square had been bad-mouthing the mosque; she said that the bathrooms were filthy and that the women’s section smelled terrible because people were sleeping everywhere. “She said her church is cleaner than the mosque,” one of the young men said. He told the Sheikh that the Muslims needed to be more selective about whom they allowed inside.

“Half of the girls sleeping in the mosque have run away from home,” Sheikh Samy responded. “Is it better to leave them on the square with the thugs who will do what they wish or to let them stay here?” He continued, “The mosque is a house of God. It’s not a place for sleeping. But when people come at a time like this I can’t kick them out. It’s not my role—I’m not the imam here. And half the people on the square are thugs. If I kick them out, they’ll wait outside and beat me up.”

“I’m on the square and I’m not a thug,” one of the young men complained.

“I said ‘half the people,’ ” Sheikh Samy said. He was sitting at a small table that was covered with about a hundred I.D. cards. “We found all these in stolen wallets,” he said, picking up a stack. “And you’re telling me there aren’t any thugs on the square?”

“Sorry, Bad Cop’s already been here, and he took your donut.”Buy the print »

On the tenth day of the protests, a man was brought into the mosque after getting caught with scissors in his possession. A small mob dragged him through the prayer room and began beating him in the back washroom, which is traditionally used for ritual cleansing before prayers. I was sitting about fifteen feet away, talking with Waleed through an interpreter, and periodically we had to stop because of the man’s screams. A couple of people knelt nearby, trying to pray. By now, Waleed’s white sweater had turned a dingy gray. All the volunteers shared a distinctive look: day by day, their clothes got dirtier, and their faces drew tighter, and their eyes looked more exhausted. It felt like ages since I had witnessed the lenient response to the first theft in the mosque.

Scissors were considered contraband because thieves used them to slit pockets. Waleed said that the man’s hands would be bound until they decided what to do with him. They held suspected criminals in the upper-story room; sometimes they beat people to teach them a lesson, and sometimes they turned them over to a prosecutor outside the square. A common method for determining degree of guilt involved counting the number of cell phones an individual had on his person. One volunteer told me that he had tortured a suspected government agent in order to figure out his mission. (He said that the torture had been successful, although he wouldn’t reveal his findings.) People were increasingly paranoid, and fights often broke out in the mosque. Self-appointed security guards wandered in and out, dressed in the padded sparring vests used by martial artists. Many vests were decorated with the Rising Sun; when these warriors stalked around barefoot in front of the mihrab, it felt like the mosque had turned into a Tae Kwon Do studio.

But it was true that thefts happened constantly, and some of the crimes were bizarre. One man was arrested for impersonating a doctor in the mosque’s medical center. Several volunteer health workers told me that a large amount of donated medicine had been removed without permission, probably to be sold on the black market. When I visited the entrance to the storeroom for drugs, at the back of the mosque, it was guarded by men whose source of authority was unclear, apart from the fact that they were armed with makeshift weapons. They had detained a suspected police agent who they claimed had stabbed somebody. They said that they hadn’t decided what to do with him yet. He was sitting on the ground, playing cards. People outside the front door of the mosque offered to sell me hash. The night before the scissors incident, a young man and a woman had been caught having sex in a tent on Tahrir. A mob beat them so badly that the woman had to be taken to a hospital; the man was dumped off at the mosque. “He was crawling on all fours when they brought him in,” Waleed told me. “He felt better after a while. I gave him some milk and juice.”

Around this time, I started wondering about Sharia. But I noticed that most of the Salafis had made themselves scarce, and the sheikh who had talked to me about how the revolution would lead to strict Islamic law seemed to have gone home. (I also noticed that during this period nobody cared whether or not I shaved.) Sheikh Samy, who had spoken with honesty and sympathy about the young people on the square, had tried to break up a fight and was injured. The last time I saw him, his head was heavily bandaged; I was told that he left Cairo to resume a teaching job in another city.

It was hard to imagine what lessons the young people on Tahrir would take away from this stage of the revolution. Virtually everybody with authority—the imams and the politicians, the progressives and the fundamentalists—had washed their hands of the demonstrators. In the mosque, volunteers were overwhelmed, and they struggled to manage an institution that felt even more directionless than the country as a whole. And yet from a distance it was clear that the protests had served a valuable purpose. They reminded the Egyptians of the original goals of the Arab Spring, and they proved to the military and the political parties that there was still a deep wellspring of anger. Considering all the unrest, it was remarkable that the first round of the elections, which were held on the eleventh day of the protests, were civil and well organized. When I spoke with people at polling stations, many said that they appreciated the demonstrators. It was also common to hear citizens remark that this was the first time in their lives that they had bothered to vote. At one site in the Cairo suburb of Maadi, I counted twelve hundred and seventy people waiting patiently in line.

According to preliminary results, the Muslim Brotherhood drew the most support in the initial round, as expected. But the Salafis did surprisingly well, with early results indicating that their party, Al Nour, would finish in second place. Given that these results included a number of relatively progressive parts of Egypt, it seems clear that the Islamists will enjoy a majority after the parliamentary election cycle finishes, in January. But it’s hard to tell how religious the policies will be in a government dominated by the Brotherhood’s party, Freedom and Justice. The official party platform emphasizes free-market policies, and it clearly advocates equality regardless of faith or gender, although women and young people had traditionally played little role in the Party leadership. In Cairo, I spoke with many supporters who emphasized stability rather than Islam, and they believed that the organization’s reputation for discipline made it less likely to succumb to the corruption and cruelty of Mubarak’s regime. Candidates themselves were careful to downplay religion. “We are not concerned with speaking about Islam and pulling people to the mosque,” Hazem Farouk Mansour, a candidate in the Cairo district of Shobra, told me. “That is not the job of a political party. We know that well.”

I mentioned that some observers, including those overseas, worried that the Brotherhood would act on the fundamentalist impulses that had helped shape the group during many of the years when it was banned. “You are right to think like that,” Mansour said. He was an oral surgeon who continued to practice medicine. “We have been underground for eighty years,” he said. “When I speak to you now and I’m under the light, then you can know me well. I’ve been under the light for only six to eight months.” He emphasized that repression in the past had sometimes pushed people toward extremism. This made sense, but it was also true that nobody knew how such an organization would respond to its first taste of power.

On the square, many demonstrators boycotted the elections, and they refused to end their sit-in. Tahrir remained a self-contained world: as the days passed, and the older generation continued to leave the square alone, it resembled a place where the young, the poor, and the uneducated could get a brief taste of authority before they joined the rest of the country in wherever it was going. There was something desperate about this instinct—the volunteer checkpoints, the citizen arrests, the mob justice. And, despite whatever coherence could be found in the long-range view, the situation on the square felt confusing and dispiriting. People at the mosque seemed isolated, and I never heard them talk about Facebook or Twitter, the social-media stars of the early revolution. In fact, even basic telephone contact was difficult with the people I met, because so many mobiles had been stolen.

After the elections, protesters organized an event on Tahrir to commemorate the recent martyrs, but the turnout was poor. Middle-class Egyptians had been willing to come out in the early days and watch protesters fight and sometimes die—the final count exceeded forty fatalities—but they seemed much less interested in memorializing those deaths. For most people, it was time to move on; the demonstrators and the dead had served their purpose.

On the fifteenth day of the protests, I finally saw Sheikh Mazhar Shahin at the Omar Makram Mosque. The imam officiated at an outdoor service on Tahrir, and in his sermon he praised the demonstrators. “This country has to be ruled by people who lived through the revolution and struggled in it!” he said. “We are all martyrs, and whoever wants our departure from the square will have to harvest our souls!”

After the ceremony, the Sheikh walked to the mosque, flanked by bodyguards, who fended off admirers. When I approached him, he smiled and said that unfortunately he couldn’t talk because he had to film a television program elsewhere in Cairo. Later, a translator telephoned him on my behalf, asking whether it was true that he hadn’t been in the mosque during the protests. “I was there every day,” the Sheikh said. “I was there as required, for the sunset and evening prayers.” I told the Sheikh’s assistant that this wasn’t what I had observed, but we could talk about it the next day, when I would be there once more for the sunset prayer. As usual, somebody else performed the prayer, and the Sheikh was nowhere to be found. During a period of more than two weeks I saw him at the mosque only once.

On that day, he left the prayer room after five minutes. I talked instead with a volunteer named Mohammed Sultan. I asked about Waleed, and Mohammed said, “Waleed is gone.” And then he told me a story: A couple of nights earlier, Waleed had gathered more than ten cell phones and three hundred dollars from people who were sleeping in the mosque, explaining that he would keep these things safe. And that was the last anybody had seen of Waleed. “You should call your article ‘Waleed the Fraud,’ ” Mohammed told me. Later, when I called Waleed, he denied everything, but he didn’t return to the mosque, and several other people confirmed Mohammed’s story.

Mohammed was a strict Muslim, as well as the most even-keeled of the volunteers. He rarely smiled, and I never saw him get angry. He took Waleed’s crime in stride: Tahrir veterans formerly made necklaces from bullet casings; now they exchanged war stories about petty theft. Nevertheless, Mohammed said that he was glad he had taken time off from his job as a driver in order to participate in the revolution. “It has a lot of meaning,” he said. “At first, it was handled by real men, but now there are other people who bring down the revolution.”

He was joined by Ahmed Salem, a young man who volunteered in the mosque’s pharmacy. “We’re still in the same circle as we were in January,” Ahmed told me. “Maybe we don’t know how to take the next step. We are just youth. The older generation is still directing us as if they were chess players. We are the chess pieces right now.”

I asked Mohammed how long he would stay in the mosque.

“Until the revolution succeeds,” he said, his face serious. But he broke into a smile when I asked for his cell-phone number. “It was stolen,” he said, and he explained that somebody had picked his pocket while he was sleeping in the mosque. “What about you?” he said.

I winced a little, and then I said, “My wallet was stolen on the first day.” ♦